AMEN 2014: Joined Together

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Breakout Sessions B

Bob Hunsaker

Ghost in Your Genes OR God in Your Genes

This is a very interesting topic to me and I guess it's interesting to you too, how there is a relationship in our experience between God and our genetics.

I didn't realize when I put this presentation together that it was Halloween on the day I was speaking, so Ghost in the Jeans has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that today is Halloween.

Someone just pointed that out to me today and they said, oh, is that a, did you plan that?

I said, no, I didn't even think about that.

And I thought this is a scene, I should mention financial disclosures, nothing pertinent to what we're talking about today.

So here's the objectives I'd like to talk about today.

Number 1, there's a lot of quotes that we'll look at, some in the Bible, some in the spirit of prophecy, and also in the popular press, that have a lot to say about the relationship between our genetic inheritance and our behavior.

Now we're – it's kind of intuitive for us to think of genetics and physical characteristics like eye color and height and those types of things.

We don't always think as intuitively about things like our genetic heritage.

But it's not as intuitive for us to think about how genes influence our behavior and less commonly understood how our behavior influences our genes.

And that's just been something that's fascinated me as I've kind of moved through my undergraduate, graduate, and professional career.

Just kind of, it's not my area of work, but it's just something I've been collecting information about over time.

So we're going to look at some statements from the Bible, the Spirit of Prophecy, and popular press about that.

Then we want to understand where current research kind of gives us light on this, and does the current literature kind of support the position of the Bible and the position of the spirit of prophecy in regards to these issues relating to behavior, moral choice, and inheritance, which we'll define as used to be just genetics, but now we have the whole epigenetics category that we're going to talk about a little bit today, too.

Zeno's going to spend a lot more time on this afterwards, so I didn't want to steal his thunder, so I'm just going to touch on this.

My emphasis is more whether it's epigenetic or it's genetic, it occurs.

Whereas Zeno's going to spend more time just on the epigenetics.

Then I want us to understand, no matter what is occurring in our experience influencing our behavior and our choices, the incarnation life of Jesus gives us really strong example and a strong encouragement for whatever we're struggling with, God can bring us through that experience.

It's just an influence on our experience.

And there's a lot of things going on in the popular press that's saying, oh, if it's in your genes, you're stuck.

But I think we'll see from the evidence and certainly from the life of Christ that that's not necessarily the case.

So now here's a verse that I used to kind of think about.

It's in the 10 Commandments, both in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 and a couple other places.

"'The Lord is longsuffering and abundant in mercy, "'forgiving iniquity and transgression, "'but he by no means clears the guilty.

And there's this phrase, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations.

You've probably kind of looked at that and go, that's a little, that doesn't quite fit my picture of God.

It seems a little arbitrary and unjust, if that's what it's saying, that God would hold the behavior of a grandparent or great-grandparent against the offspring 3 and 4 generations down the road.

So that seems like a little bit of an unusual statement that as a young college student, I say, well, what does that mean and what's being communicated to us there?

Is it in fact God being unjust or is there something else going on that God's communicating to us?

You see something similar to that in Psalms, the wicked are estranged from the womb, they go astray from birth.

So again, we're seeing here the Bible communicating to us something about not just when we're born, but even before we're born, there's influences that are brought to bear not just on our eye color and our height and those kind of things, but on our moral makeup.

If you want to do an interesting study, there's a whole field of literature called moral babies or moral infants.

I'll show you a book later that addresses that if that's something you want to study.

But infants are not these kind of nebulous blobs who really have no decision-making processes, no perceptual powers until maybe 2 years old.

They've shown quite well from 3 to 6 months of age that babies are already making moral decisions.

They're differentiating between what's good and what's bad, what's right and what's wrong.

The way they do this is, and we won't spend much time on this, the way they do this is they just take babies.

And the way you can watch what babies like are, number 1, what they spend the most time looking at.

So the more time a baby spends gazing at something, the more he likes it.

And number 2, if you present him with options, what he reaches for is what he's attracted to.

So they'll do experiments, and again, I'm not gonna spend too much time on this, where they'll show little babies a puppet show.

And again, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months.

In the puppet show, there'll be 2 of the puppets interacting, playing ball perhaps.

And then the third puppet will come into the scene, and he'll take the ball and run off the stage.

Then what they'll do is they'll present those 3 puppets to the infant and see which 1 they reach for.

And they almost never reach for the 1 that took the ball away.

They almost always reach for the 1 that was playing ball.

Another way they do this is they'll have 3 puppets, and they'll have a puppet pushing a ball up a hill, up a little slope.

They'll have 1 puppet come in that helps that little puppet push the ball up the hill, and they'll have another puppet comes, and he pushes the ball back, and they're making it hard for the first puppet to push the ball up the hill.

And then again, they'll present those 3 puppets to the infant, and they'll almost always reach for the 1 that was helping the 1 up the hill.

So they're differentiating at a very, very young age, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, that something good's happening here, and something bad is happening there.

They can't speak, but they're perceiving good and evil at a young age.

Now, clearly in that setting, they're not born tabula rasa as a blank slate.

There's something hardwired into their perceptual and understanding.

They're perceiving that's good and that's not good.

And the Bible is alluding to this here, not in the positive sense, but in the negative sense.

Now our atheistic friends kind of look at this and they go, well, yeah, that seems a little odd.

You've seen the book probably, God is not great.

He says this, and he's referring specifically to the second commandment there in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy chapter 5.

He says, this is a dire warning that the sins of the fathers will be visited on their children even unto the third and fourth generation.

And here's his assessment of what's being communicated.

This, this idea that God's visiting Nicodemus on third and fourth generation, negates the moral and reasonable idea that children are innocent of their parents' offenses.

Kids are not morally responsible for their parents' mistakes, but his perception is that God's holding them guilty of this.

Just look at the title of the book for a second.

So, God Hates You, Hate Him Back, making sense of the Bible.

Ruhleman basically did is he's gone through the whole Bible.

He basically goes through passage by passage and picks out the things that seem a little hard to understand, a little bit odd, and then puts them together in this whole book with all these different things that he thinks are really a problem in the Bible.

Anyway, regarding the Second Commandment, he says this, interesting is the Second Commandment in which God promises to condemn up to 4 generations of a sinner's descendants, and further suggests that no matter how righteous your Judeo-Christian life should be, this will matter for naught if your great-great grandfather believed in a sun god and you are thus surely doomed.

And again, you can see just a literal reading, not really processing the Bible as a whole, why they might take that message away from things.

Now Ellen White says some very similar things about the hereditary nature of our moral experience.

There are many who claim to serve God but who have no external knowledge of Him.

They have not a personal relation with the living Savior, and their characters reveal defects both hereditary and cultivated.

Now you and I are pretty familiar with cultivated defects, right?

We've all done things that we wish we hadn't done and formed habits that we wish we hadn't formed.

So we're very familiar with cultivated habits of character.

She's not just saying that we cultivate defects of character.

Now what is character when you think about that?

Well, in another place she says, thoughts and feelings combined make up moral character.

So we're inheriting patterns of thinking and patterns of feeling that reveal themselves in how we relate to each other.

Those who put their trust in Christ are not to be enslaved by any hereditary or cultivated habit or tendency, hereditary tendency.

Whatever may be your inherited or cultivated tendencies to wrong, we can overcome through the power of the keys of the original parts.

So, Again, tendencies to wrong, again, a tendency is a behavior, right?

We think a lot about health issues, which is an important thing to talk about, and the health issues related to genetics.

We don't always process as much the moral dimension of heritability, And that's what we're going to look at a little bit more today.

Nyse Collins

Harnessing Our Lay People in Health Education

All right, again, we run a small consulting company, and the name of the consulting company is Sanare.

All right, And what sanare means, anybody speak Spanish?

You know you have to learn it sooner or later.

As a matter of fact, they say the Latino or the Spanish-speaking population has outnumbered the minorities, the African-Americans, and in 2025, I can't remember the exact year, 2030, they will outnumber the Caucasians in America.

So what I realized is about 2025, 2030, she's like, let me see.

So what I realized is that you can't beat them, join them.

So when I finished school a long time ago, when I used to be young, this is before you all were around.

I took off and I ran to South America, Colombia to learn a little bit of Spanish and by God's grace it has opened up a lot of doors and had the opportunity to meet with a lot of people.

So when you live the sanare life, you are living the restored what?

And we believe that people will be restored when they are educated.

So scenario life, restoration via education.

We need to find ways to be able to educate individuals because that's where the real restoration will come.

They're not going to be restored by a new pill, a new drink, a new machine is not what's going to restore people.

But when they are educated and they learn how to take care of who?

Themselves, then that's when the restoration will come.

To educate individuals, but the key to education is encouragement.

You ever try to teach a class of children that were not encouraged to learn?

That was cool sometimes or whatever like that.

You're trying to grab them, and you're afraid you don't want to be child abuse or something like that.

Can you imagine a class of adults that were not encouraged to learn?

So the key to education, everybody, is what?

Let's take a quick look at the life of Jesus.

It says that when he went to meet the needs of the people, when he helped not 1 person left who was coming for help without hope.

So did he just come and say, everybody, you need to eat sunflower seeds.

And so 1 way that we try to encourage individuals in our program, like everybody's trying to lose weight, that's the big thing now, or gain weight or lose weight.

We in our program never say somebody is fat or skinny.

Some people are over-blessed and some people are under-blessed.

Because for years, we've been telling people, you're fat, lose weight, and this is going to happen.

So in a way to encourage people, say, sister, brother, we're going to teach you how to balance your what?

When a person has hope, the sky is the what?

So we focus on giving people hope, education, and that's what we do here at Sonari Life.

So we have a small team of consultants that go to different locations.

They put on what is known as Weekend of Wellnesses.

They go to doctor's offices on many occasions.

They put on short presentations for the patients.

Government facilities, you name it, we're there trying to, what, give hope and encouragement to the individuals.

So today our topic, however, is the dynamic duo.

I'm just, I'm texting all the time, so forgive me.

The dynamic duo is the union between the medical missionary and the literature evangelist.

Everyone who comes and shares the message of health and hope is a what?

She's just an evangelist, a health, medical missionary evangelist.

Randy Bivens

Structuring Your Family for Financial Success and Service

So, what gives me the credentials to be talking about financial planning?

I actually have completed the course work to be a certified financial planner, in addition to being a physician.

And I'm gonna give you some examples of actually how I've real time helped people with financial planning.

But more than that, we've studied the scriptural basis for a financial plan and what that means.

And you're gonna see a lot of biblical references when we talk about what's going on.

I actually had the imaging contract for 2 hospitals, 1 of which I don't actually work at anymore in Ukiah.

I have privileges, but I had the chance to hire somebody right at a UCSF fellowship.

You know, you don't get very many of those.

I still manage the contract up in Tillamook, and I manage the contracts, hire the radiologist, you know, keep it rolling.

And so I have a revenue stream, kind of a built-in revenue stream that provides me an income, it allows me the freedom to do some other things.

And because of that I do some other things.

I'm president of Life and Health Network.

The great thing to be president of a media company is you can give them a handout, an outline and tell them to make you a keynote presentation.

And so if this looks good, it's not my fault.

Well, it is kind of my fault, but I didn't do any of it.

So I'm president of Life and Health Network, but More importantly, I guess for the last year and a half, I've been Chief Operating Officer at Weimar Institute.

And we've had some amazing changes that have occurred, and God just blessing that institute.

Nedley alluded to it a little bit last night.

In the last month, we had a $3.2 million debt to Amazing Facts when those 2 ministries separated.

That debt was starting to accrue interest on the 7th of August.

On the 7th of August, we bought the debt down from 3.2 million down to 1 million.

We delivered a check to Mike Rich who was, it was during ASI, we delivered a check to them for a million dollars.

I wish I was there except on August 7th I was down in Costa MESA meeting with the Educational Licensing Committee of the Board of Registered Nursing for the State of California to get nursing credentialing, which we actually did.

We got full approval to start a nursing school.

Anderson is back in the back of the room there, and she is instrumental and actually for years of making this happen, instrumental in actually making this happen and thank you Shirley for being here and Melanie's here too.

The 2 of them are the reason we got nursing accreditation here on campus and thank you guys for coming.

But in addition to that, Just about 3 weeks ago, we were on a conference call with WASC, which is the Western Association of Secondary Colleges.

We've been applying to get accreditation for a college so that credits are transferred.

We actually can graduate people from WMAR, and We do, and they go to Loma Linda, to the medical school and dental school.

They can't actually get into the health school for some reason.

We've written a letter to Dick Hart saying, how come the medical school accepts our transfer credits but the school of health doesn't?

But if we had WASC approval, that transfer of credit isn't even an issue.

So we were on a conference call with them, and there were about 7 or 8 of us answering questions because they have 2 readers that are signed by WASC that are senior professors, presidents of colleges.

And they look through your entire application, 657 pages worth, and try to determine if you're eligible for status.

They denied us 2 years ago, completely denied us.

The option was they could deny us again, but we felt we had a much better application.

They could actually condition us, and that's what we were sure we were going to get.

We're going to get conditioned and they were going to tell us to buff up our finances or buff up our curriculum or they're going to do something.

Or they could give us full approval and we felt it was going to be a miracle if they gave us full approval and it was going to take a miracle to have us denied again.

We just didn't feel that was going to happen.

So in the prayer session before this, actually people remind me that I had this prayer.

I said, Lord, I want you to either completely deny us, just slam that door shut, or give us complete approval.

I don't want any of this stuff in between.

We'll just stop spending money and stop doing it or give us approval.

Nedley as we're leaving, I said, so Neil, what do you think the odds are?

And he goes, 50-50 chance they're gonna deny us again.

Because there were some people on the WASC board who specifically are not Weimar friendly.

So we felt we were gonna get denied again.

And they said, well, we're busy for the next 2 or 3 days, but give us about 3 or 4 days and we'll be able to give you an answer.

So that's okay, they'll give us an answer.

Sebold called me and he said that Chris Oberg, who was the WASCA consultant assigned to us, he said, Chris called me and said that they don't need 3 days.

We're further along the eligibility status to our knowledge than any other self-supporting educational institution since Madison College.

And if you remember the Madison history, part of the reason why they folded was because they chose not to get accredited for their, especially their nursing program.

They had like, I don't know, where did, there are people in this room that know this history better than I, but there are a couple hundred nurses and the next day they were just not in school anymore.

Even though I'm a physician, physicians traditionally have really bad financial planning.

We think we know everything because we passed all the classes and we're at the top.

We're A type, type A, and we just thought, we can just do anything.

That's why physician, Adventist physician pilots have terrible records.

My wife has a girlfriend and she has a, they have another mutual friend and their dad was a pilot and he finally stopped flying.

There were 6 guys in this group of Adventist physicians who were pilots.

And they didn't die of coronary heart disease, they died of plane crashes.

Physicians assume that they know everything and the thing is we have great capacity to learn sometimes, but sometimes we don't have the knowledge base.

And because we have a revenue stream, we just start spending money indiscriminately.

And I'm going to try to give you some ideas and principles, biblical principles, how we can organize our financial planning so that it's according to God's glory and that we have revenue to give back.

Neither Neil nor myself take any salary from Weimar Institute.

Because as we tell them, if you just gave us the money, we would just have to give it back to you.

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Series

Breakout Sessions B

Ghost in Your Genes OR God in Your Genes

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Ghost in Your Genes OR God in Your Genes

50m

Harnessing Our Lay People in Health Education

48m

Structuring Your Family for Financial Success and Service

55m

Fit & Free

44m

Sound Doctrine